Just so we’re clear: this is a bad quote, before I get some attack chihuahua from Inaccuracy in Academia talking about how I hate America based on reading this.
Re-reading Data Trash briefly after pulling it down for cataloging, and finding myself profoundly annoyed all over again. You want a book that demonstrates the excesses of theory (while sometimes offering seductively cool-sounding quasi-literary flourishes that basically mean nothing), this is a good example.
“Advertisements are sunshine reports for reclining flesh. The body electronic finds its mirrored double in their panoramic, but frenzied, scans of the crash body as it moves from flesh to virtuality. Not scenes of a future yet to unfold, but of a semiurgical, virtual past that the electronic body has already experienced. Certainly not a machinery of solicitation for manipulable masses, but a bio-apparatus of dissuasion for virtualized flesh. A ‘strange attractor,’ advertising is a massive defensive armature created by the mediascape to win back virtualized flesh to the logistics of desire. However, the bio-net of advertising must fail because the body electronic has already vectored along the vapor trail of virtual reality, leaving behind only a brilliant, because ghostly, halo-effect marking its disappearance from earthly space.” p. 36
Maybe we have a new method for creating Bulwer-Lytton Contest entries: use nonsensical jargon as inspiration? Let’s see:
“Recumbent after a three-martini lunch, advertising executive Jeff Switzpiggle synecdochied his industry’s obsession with translating the body into e-viscera, languidly letting the flesh on his upper arm sway to the beat of his latest release for the new perfume “Putrescence” as he watched the 30-second commercial on his 144-inch office screen, unable to sense let alone ignore the approaching knife in the hands of a frenzied post-Foucaultian English grad student frustrated with the drawing of her peers into the orbit of commercial pop culture and determined to end the charade of opiate ocular therapy with a single slice.”
Talk about a blast from the grad school/pomo past!
If there’s one “good” thing to say about the K’s, it’s that they helped me find that threshold beyond which my own personal “logistics of desire” would not follow. Heh. Vectoring along the vapor trail indeed…
cgb
Yeah, I had something of the same feeling: I’d been reading lots of critical theory, was deep inside the space of theory, and was starting to really feel like I’d lost the trail of breadcrumbs that would lead me out. Then a friend told me to read Data Trash, that it was really useful, and I was like, “This makes no sense whatsoever.”. Then I started going back and reading other things, and let’s just say there were a lot of naked emperors to be found.
Reminds me of one of the authors on Terra Nova, to be honest, but it would need to have a terribly annoying question at the end and about 18 links, one for each allusion.